This is partly because the settings are notionally mundane: Schulz’s subject matter (there is no distinction drawn between him and his unnamed narrator) is his home town – then in Poland, now Ukraine – and his family. Here is a new way of looking at the world.” (Kafka is also recalled in details: the end of ‘A Hunger Artist’ in one story, the opening of ‘Metamorphosis’ in another.) The writing is vivid and violent, the imagery superabundant, the imagination unfettered. Equally it is not quite a novel it is more a story cycle, with recurring characters and themes, where the end and the beginning are arbitrary, and the potential seems infinite.ĭiscovering Schulz is like reading Kafka or Robert Walser for the first time: my reaction was something like, “Well. I was right and wrong: what we have is clearly more than a collection of discrete stories. Although the title of my edition (above) clearly states The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, I had it in mind that The Street of Crocodiles was a novel, and that the ‘other stories’ were the additional ones collected here, from Schulz’s second book, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass. 1963 by Celina Wieniewska) is an object lesson in the effect which expectations have on our reading of a book. “You killed my Jew,” he told Landau, “I killed yours.” Later, Günther exacted revenge when he came across Bruno Schulz in a forbidden Aryan zone in the town, and shot him in the head. In November 1942, Landau shot dead a Jew favoured by another Gestapo, Karl Günther. Jonathan Safran Foer’s foreword gives us the horrible details: Schulz, a talented artist (the cover illustration below is his), was protected by a Gestapo officer named Felix Landau Schulz painted murals for his son’s bedroom. Like many of them, he was Jewish, and like too many of them – that is, any of them – his career and life were cut short. “Bruno Schulz”, says the author page of this book, “was one of the most gifted writers to have come out of Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.” Considering the others who qualify for this description, that’s no small accolade.

The street of crocodiles